Related papers: Effect of the granular material on the maximum hol…

In this work, we investigate the forces acting on a flexible fiber dragged through a granular bed. Using discrete element simulations, we observe that, after a sufficiently large displacement, the system reaches a steady state in which both…

We study fluctuations in the drag force experienced by an object moving through a granular medium. The successive formation and collapse of jammed states give a stick-slip nature to the fluctuations which are periodic at small depths but…

Fruit harvesting has recently experienced a shift towards soft grippers that possess compliance, adaptability, and delicacy. In this context, pneumatic grippers are popular, due to provision of high deformability and compliance, however…

Recently, magnetorheological elastomers have become an interesting smart material with many new designs for robotics. A variety of applications have been built with magnetorheological elastomers, such as vibration absorbers, actuators, or…

Able to grasp objects of any shape and size, universal grippers using variable stiffness phenomenon such as granular jamming have been developed for disaster robotics application. However, as their contact interface is mainly composed of…

Novel robotic grippers have captured increasing interests recently because of their abilities to adapt to varieties of circumstances and their powerful functionalities. Differing from traditional gripper with mechanical components-made…

Granular materials, composed of discrete solid grains, can be modeled as simple mechanical systems. However, these materials can undergo spontaneous slow deformation, or creep, even under small forces and while in apparent mechanical…

This letter presents a novel small gripper capable of grasping various types of small-sized items from flat surfaces for the assembly of small devices. Using a single actuator, the proposed gripper realizes two grasping modes: parallel-grip…

Biological locomotion in nature is often achieved by the interaction between a flexible body and its surrounding medium. The interaction of a flexible body with granular media is less understood compared with viscous fluids partially due to…

Manipulating deformable objects in robotic cells is often costly and not widely accessible. However, the use of localized pneumatic gripping systems can enhance accessibility. Current methods that use pneumatic grippers to handle deformable…

When compressed frictional granular media are decompressed, generically a fragile configuration is created at low pressures. Typically this is accompanied by a giant frictional slippage as the fragile state collapses. We show that this…

Granular materials such as sand, powders, foams etc. are ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as in industrial and geotechnical applications. Although these disordered systems form stable structures if unperturbed, in practice they do…

Granular jamming is a popular soft actuation mechanism that provides high stiffness variability with minimum volume variation. Jamming is particularly interesting from a design perspective, as a myriad of design parameters can potentially…

Granular packings display a wealth of mechanical features which are of widespread significance. One of these features is creep: the slow deformation under applied stress. Creep is common for many other amorphous materials such as many…

Robot grasping is subject to an inherent tradeoff: Grippers with a large span typically take a longer time to close, and fast grippers usually cover a small span. However, many practical applications of soft grippers require the ability to…

Although the multi-jointed underactuated manipulator is highly dexterous, its grasping capacity does not match that of the parallel jaw gripper. This work introduces a fractal gripper to enhance the grasping capacity of multi-joint…

Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…

Granular jamming has recently become popular in soft robotics with widespread applications including industrial gripping, surgical robotics and haptics. Previous work has investigated the use of various techniques that exploit the nature of…

We investigate how the kinetic energy acquired by a dense granular system driven by an external vibration depends on the input energy. Our focus is on the dependence of the granular behavior on two main parameters: frequency and vibration…

Granular fronts are a common yet unexplained phenomenon emerging during the gravity driven free-surface flow of concentrated suspensions. They are usually believed to be the result of fluid convection in combination with particle size…